Women in Medicine

Clements Apartment Building // c.1885

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Brookline is pretty great as you can find unique and well-preserved examples of nearly every type of building in almost every architectural style! Staying in Brookline Village, this apartment building stands out as one of the best panel-brick apartments I have seen. The property was developed in the mid-1880s by Thomas W. Clements, who served in the Army during the American Civil War and later settled in the Boston area working as a dentist. Thomas married Lydia R. Clements, who is much more interesting than her husband! She was a graduate of the Boston University School of Medicine and worked locally for years, but wanted more. In the spring of 1898, she set out with a party of men and women, determined to make their fortune in the gold fields of the Klondike. During the months long trek, all of the other women and some of the men in her party left the expedition before reaching their goal, but Lydia Clements persevered and became one of the first white women — possibly the first from the East — to cross the Chilkoot Pass into the Klondike region. She never made a fortune, but upon returning, she was more spiritual, and got involved in the occult philosophy of Prof. Charles H. Mackay and his West Gate School of Philosophy in Boston. She used her new learnings to go back to Alaska to make her fortune, but there is no indication that Clements ever did make her fortune. She did however, remain in Nome and elsewhere in Alaska for more than a decade, hiring men and mining tin and gold. She retained her Brookline residence here on Davis Avenue and travelled back and forth across the continent many times before returning to Brookline, before dying there in February 1927.

Dimock Center – Zakrzewska Building // 1873

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Following the construction of Cary Cottage at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Roxbury (last post), architects Cummings and Sears turned their attention to designing the most important facility in the complex, the large two-story Zakrzewska Building built in 1873. It is a fine example of polychromatic High Victorian Gothic style with Stick detailing. The building is characterized by its decorative stone and brick string courses, arched window heads, polychrome slate roof, end towers, and a gambrel dormer. The building was named after Dr. Maria Zakrzewska (1829-1902), a Polish-American doctor who moved to the United States in 1853, eventually settling in Boston in 1859, working as a professor of obstetrics at the New England Female Medical College. There, she realized that women in medicine did not have the same opportunity to advance in their field and left, launching her own hospital, the New England Hospital for Women and Children. It was the first in Boston, and the second hospital in America, to be run by women physicians and surgeons. Dr. Zakrzewska knew that the opportunity to work with large numbers of patients was vital if women physicians were to achieve the same levels of training and standards of practice as male physicians. The hospital became a primary training hospital for several generations of women physicians, and also trained nurses. The hospital was extremely successful and remains a medical institution to this day, as the Dimock Health Center.